Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/55

 the accusation that the satirist is spiteful, and continues:

"Liberius si Dixero quid, si forte jocosius, hoc mihi juris Cum venia dabis."

From the nature of English satire up to the eighteenth century, we do not expect, nor do we find, much interest in this phase of it. Then comes Young, reviving the Horatian caution:

"Who, for the poor renown of being smart, Would leave a sting within a brother's heart?"

And Cowper completes the portrait:

"Unless a love of virtue light the flame, Satire is, more than those he brands, to blame; He hides behind a magisterial air His own offenses, and strips others bare; Affects, indeed, a most humane concern, That men, if gently tutor'd, will not learn; That mulish folly, not to be reclaimed By softer methods, must be made ashamed;"

De Quincey uses Pope as a horrible example of this failing, contrasting him with the indignant Juvenal:

"Pope, having no such internal principle of wrath boiling in his breast, * * * was unavoidably a hypocrite of the first magnitude when he affected (or sometimes really conceited himself) to be in a dreadful passion with offenders as a body. It provokes fits of laughter * * * to watch him in the process of brewing the storm that spontaneously will not come; whistling, like a mariner, for a wind to fill his satiric